24th Annual Poets House Showcase Opening Reading with Patricia Spears Jones, Alicia Jo Rabins, Camille Rankine, and Stacy Szymaszek

Readings by poets Patricia Spears Jones (A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems – White Pine Press), Alicia Jo Rabins (Divinity School – American Poetry Review), Camille Rankine (Incorrect Merciful Impulses – Copper Canyon Press), and Stacy Szymaszek (Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals – Fence Books) open the 2016 Poets House Showcase, our free exhibit featuring all of the new poetry books and poetry-related texts published in the United States in a single year from over 650 commercial, university, and independent presses.

Preceded by the Showcase Opening Reception. Exhibition on view through August 20.

Patricia Spears Jones is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems (2015). She has received a number of grants and awards, among them fellowships from the Black Earth Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Previously a Program Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, she is presently a lecturer at CUNY and a Contributing Editor at BOMB Magazine.

Alicia Jo Rabins’ debut poetry collection Divinity Schooll (2015) was selected by C.D. Wright for the 2015 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She has been the recipient of the Artscape Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has toured with her chamber-rock opera A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff and her song cycle Girls in Trouble.

Camille Rankine is a poet, writer, and educator. She has been awarded the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship, the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and the Cave Canem Honorary Fellowship. She is currently a visiting professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Incorrect Merciful Impulses (2015) is her first full-length collection of poetry.

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent book, Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), was the winner of the 2015 Ottoline Prize. She has been the recipient of a number of honors, among them a 2014 Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.